Electronic systems and circuits are often utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as computers, video equipment, and communication systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating information in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve storage of vast amounts of important and confidential information and significant resources are expended storing and processing the information. Coordinating utilization of the vast amounts of storage can be complex and complicated.
Virtual environments typically include virtualized computers and/or operating systems known as virtual machines or guests which access host hardware or physical resources through emulated devices presented by a hypervisor. Accesses for virtual storage writes often involve the consumption of host hardware or physical storage resources. Conventional storage utilization and management often involve attempts at storage reclamation. While traditional attempts may allow for physical storage recovery and reclamation in some situations, attempted physical reclamation corresponding to virtual reclamation is usually very difficult. Storage used for the purpose of storing virtual machine images and application data deleted inside a virtual machine does not typically result in storage reclamation on the actual physical storage. Traditional approaches to storage reclamation in virtual environments typically require the virtual machine to be “shut down” and the entire virtual machine image to be deleted.
Repeatedly shutting down a virtual machine to reclaim physical memory can adversely impact realization of performance results and the ability of the virtual machine in achieving the results. While conventional approaches of leaving the virtual machine running for extended periods of time to enable realization of results usually creates consumption of significant amounts of resources including portions that can not be readily reclaimed. Providing the level of storage resources to accommodate the traditional approaches to prolonged running of virtual machines can be inconvenient and inefficient.